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Sunday, September 16, 2012

Okay, just kidding about the buzzword compliance. They do have a few in the article (see excerpt below) but I'm sure they don't mean it the way some people do. Sanjay Ghemawat of Google, who worked on their BigTable and MapReduce products, is one of the co-authors of the paper about Spanner.

Spanner is Google's scalable, multi-version, globally-distributed, and synchronously-replicated database. It is the first system to distribute data at global scale and support externally-consistent distributed transactions. This paper describes how Spanner is structured, its feature set, the rationale underlying various design decisions, and a novel time API that exposes clock uncertainty. This API and its implementation are critical to supporting external consistency and a variety of powerful features: non-blocking reads in the past, lock-free read-only transactions, and atomic schema changes, across all of Spanner.